JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has repeatedly suggested that AI adoption would not drive widespread layoffs at the bank. But on Tuesday, he disclosed that JPMorgan had made significant cuts to a number of departments due to AI.
Dimon shared the changes during the company’s latest earnings call, in response to a question about whether AI could make companies like JPMorgan leaner, which referenced fintech company Block’s controversial decision to slash headcount.
“We fully expect it’ll have huge efficiency in certain parts of the company,” Dimon said. He added that AI-related productivity gains had already led JPMorgan to eliminate certain jobs—though most of those employees were able to find opportunities in other parts of the business.
“We are preparing to make sure we can retrain our people,” he said. “We have had discrete areas where we did reduce jobs by 30% or 40%, and most of those people [were] offered jobs elsewhere.”
But Dimon stopped short of saying the firm’s embrace of AI would drastically reduce expenses. In fact, CFO Jeremy Barnum noted that JPMorgan would have to keep an eye on token expenses. While he described those expenses as a “trivial number” at the moment, he anticipated costs would increase in the second half of the year—an issue that many companies are grappling with as AI usage keeps growing.
The reshuffling at JPMorgan aligns with a bit of a shift in Dimon’s stance on AI. He had previously argued the technology would largely impact productivity at the bank, rather than usher in broader job losses.
In February, Dimon said employees were saving time by using AI tools but that those productivity gains had not translated to any notable changes in headcount. A couple of months ago, Dimon acknowledged in an interview with Bloomberg that AI would eventually reshape JPMorgan’s hiring decisions, likely reducing its pool of bankers. “I think it will reduce our jobs down the road,” he said. “There will be all different types of jobs, and I think we will be hiring more AI people and fewer bankers in certain categories, and it will make them more productive.”
Some of Dimon’s peers have been more extreme in their predictions about how AI will transform banking jobs. But other CEOs appear to be wavering in their belief that AI will rapidly eliminate jobs on a large scale, embracing a perspective that seems more in line with Dimon’s position.
Tech leaders like Sam Altman have admitted they may have overestimated the effects of AI on the workforce: “I’m delighted to be wrong about this,” he said at a conference appearance in May. “I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened.” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei—who previously suggested that AI could wipe out about half of all white-collar, entry-level jobs—has now claimed that he did not intend to be a “prophet of doom,” but that he wanted to give people a chance to prepare for job displacement.
And while tech companies have continued to move forward with mass layoffs, they now reflexively note that their decision was not directly tied to AI, whether or not that’s actually the case.
Just last week, Microsoft announced thousands of job cuts, many of which would affect employees in its Xbox division. But the HR chief insisted the layoffs were not the result of AI—even as the tech company keeps spending billions of dollars on data centers.
“The roles eliminated today are not being replaced by AI,” she wrote in a memo. “At the same time, what is true is that AI is changing how work gets done. Some of the tasks we do every day can now be automated, and that means we all need to keep learning, keep building new skills, and keep adapting as the work evolves.”
